What was your family's first computer?

Oct 8, 2011 3:23 AM

I'm guessing many wooters are around my age...possibly, between the age of 20 and 34. If so, you would have still been at home when Dad or Mom brought home that first computer. It's fun reminiscing about that Commodore 64 that my Dad brought back to our house in 1994. It was a hand-me-down from his brother's family, definitely outdated, but still fun, nonetheless. Oh the countless hours playing those old word-games, haha.

What was your family's first computer? When did you get it? Did your mom also make a daily chart for the fridge, laying out the times when you or your siblings could be on the computer??

We're probably older than your parents. Mine was a non-branded PC with an astonishing 20mg hard drive. When the neighborhood geek who built if for me explained how many pages of documents could be stored on 20mgs, I couldn't imagine how anyone could ever fill one up.

By 1992 I had a 300 baud modem, installed by my son; I used to sit with a book in my lap, reading while pages downloaded. Thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I was able to upgrade to 2400baud.

My not-then-spouse's first computer was an Amiga 500 back around 1990 or 1991.

Times change. Between the two of us we currently have four desktops, two laptops, a netbook, and a tablet. No smart phone, though.

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We're probably older than your parents. Mine was a non-branded PC with an astonishing 20mg hard drive. When the neighborhood geek who built if for me explained how many pages of documents could be stored on 20mgs, I couldn't imagine how anyone could ever fill one up.

By 1992 I had a 300 baud modem, installed by my son; I used to sit with a book in my lap, reading while pages downloaded. Thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I was able to upgrade to 2400baud.

My not-then-spouse's first computer was an Amiga 500 back around 1990 or 1991.

Times change. Between the two of us we currently have four desktops, two laptops, a netbook, and a tablet. No smart phone, though.

Not being anywhere near your age group, I'll just say that the first computer type instrument I had was an abacus. Young whippersnapper!<---and yes, that is redundant.

My first purchased computer was an Acer in 1996. It was horrid. Have heard that the company was sued & went bankrupt (not sure of that, though). They came back with a better company and computers, so I hear.

@gmwhit: I was absolutely in love with the Acer that came in a deep forest green color; it was the first computer that wasn't gray or beige. Fortunately a geeky friend convinced me not to buy it by pointing out how lousy the physical design was and noting that no one could easily get into it to make any changes.

Mine was a TRS-80 Model 3 bought around 1981 or 1982. It came with a whopping 8K of RAM and no floppy drives. Had to use a cassette recorder to save my programs. The monitor could support 64 characters wide by 16 lines down.

I later upgraded it to the maximum of 48K RAM and two 180K floppy drives. The computer and upgrades costs me a small fortune and took me several years to finally pay off the debt.

I'm going on 33 years of working with computers as a system administrator and there are others here that can easily call me a n00b by comparison to themselves.

In 1980, my first computer was an S-100 based system cobbled together out of assorted parts that I mostly assembled myself (by soldering the chips and other parts onto the circuit boards); I designed parts of it (the front panel) as well.

In terms of store-bought systems, I got an Atari 800 less than a year later. There were several other systems (a Cromemco C-10, a Commodore 64, an Atari 400, an IMSAI 8080 (though with a Z-80 CPU), and several Z-80 and 8086 based single board computers).

My first PC was a 10MHz 80286 (IBM AT compatible) in 1987. It had 1MB of RAM, a big 40MB hard drive, and both 360KB and 1.2MB floppy drives; it cost $3997. I already had a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 and got a 2400 bps modem (a Multitech) around 1990.

The first computer I remember using was a Compaq, I think it originally had Windows 95 on it with a Pentium II processor. I specifically remember my family buying it from Costco, I think it cost around two or three thousand dollars.

My parents also had a Packard Bell with Windows 3.1 on it, I still think my dad has some 8-inch floppies with it, wherever he stored it. I think I had to been 10 or so years old, I remember playing on it and there was this one program we had on there, I don't remember what it was but I would always print the stuff I did on it, we had a dot matrix printer with it too. I always enjoyed watching it print and the sounds it made.

I can't remember any of the specs, I was young, but at the time it was up there. A guy that my step dad worked with built us one for gaming. It was pretty sweet. I wasted hundreds of hours playing Quake, Doom, and a ton of other games.

My first computer is the one I have now I had built a couple years ago.
Intel 2 Duel Core, Nvidia 9500GT graphics card, LG Blu Ray burner, with 8GB of DDR2 all pushing Windows 7.
It won't handle Battlefield 3 I found out last night. My card doesn't even show up on their list. Time to upgrade.

My parents bought me a Atari 2600 in 1981 but my first real computer was a Commodore 64 in 1987 @ age 11.

I had two 1541 5 1/4 floppy's and a 300 bps modem w/ no speaker only a red light and a list of local BBS's. Slime's Court, The Sand Dunes, Fortress of Solitude, The Hippodrome, Casa Mi Amiga and so on. Calling during crazy hours and hoping to log on for some new warez.

Saved all summer in 1988 for a 1581 3 1/2 drvie to get 720K - super slow!!! Then saved all winter for a 1200 bps commodore modem and my parents bought me a 1084S RGB Monitor which I later used with the Amgia.

We had a TI994A from close to the time it came out in 1981. We also added some of the upgrades to it as they came out like the floppy drive and the voice box that let the programs use speech. We used it for home schooling, games, and my dad used it for his work.

Atari 2600 with Programming Cartridge and keyboard controllers was my first, but its severe limitations in all aspects pretty much disqualifies it. After that was Commodore VIC-20. Then Commodore 64. Much later was Amiga 500 followed by Amiga 3000. Much later again was a self built 486 PC with Windows 95. And many more to the present.

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